Gift Outcompetes Exchange

There is a more interesting possibility here. I suspect
academia and the hacker culture share adaptive patterns not because
they're genetically related, but because they've both evolved the one
most optimal social organization for what they're trying to do, given
the laws of nature and the instinctive wiring of human beings.
The verdict of history seems to be that free-market capitalism is the
globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency; perhaps, in
a similar way, the reputation-game gift culture is the globally
optimal way to cooperate for generating (and checking!) high-quality
creative work.

Support for this theory becomes from a large body of
psychological studies on the interaction between art and reward [GNU]. These studies have received less
attention than they should, in part perhaps because their popularizers
have shown a tendency to overinterpret them into general attacks
against the free market and intellectual property. Nevertheless,
their results do suggest that some kinds of scarcity-economics rewards
actually decrease the productivity of creative workers such as
programmers.

Psychologist Theresa Amabile of Brandeis University, cautiously
summarizing the results of a 1984 study of motivation and reward,
observed ``It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less
creative than work that is done out of pure interest.''. Amabile goes
on to observe that ``The more complex the activity, the more it's hurt
by extrinsic reward.'' Interestingly, the studies suggest that
flat salaries don't demotivate, but piecework rates and bonuses do.

Thus, it may be economically smart to give performance bonuses to
people who flip burgers or dug ditches, but it's probably smarter to
decouple salary from performance in a programming shop and let
people choose their own projects (both trends that the open-source
world takes to their logical conclusions). Indeed, these results
suggest that the only time it is a good idea to reward performance
in programming is when the programmer is so motivated that he
or she would have worked without the reward!

Other researchers in the field are willing to point a finger
straight at the issues of autonomy and creative control that so
preoccupy hackers. ``To the extent one's experience of being
self-determined is limited,'' said Richard Ryan, associate
psychology professor at the University of Rochester, ``one's
creativity will be reduced as well.''

In general, presenting any task as a means rather than an end in
itself seems to demotivate. Even winning a competition with others or
gaining peer esteem can be demotivating in this way if the victory is
experienced as work for reward (which may explain why hackers are
culturally prohibited from explicitly seeking or claiming that
esteem).

To complicate the management problem further, controlling verbal
feedback seems to be just as demotivating as piecework payment. Ryan
found that corporate employees who were told, ``Good, you're doing as
you should'' were ``significantly less intrinsically
motivated than those who received feedback informationally.''

It may still be intelligent to offer incentives, but they have to come
without attachments to avoid gumming up the works. There is a critical
difference (Ryan observes) between saying, ``I'm giving you this
reward because I recognize the value of your work'', and ``You're
getting this reward because you've lived up to my standards.'' The
first does not demotivate; the second does.

In these psychological observations we can ground a case that an
open-source development group will be substantially more productive
(especially over the long term, in which creativity becomes more
critical as a productivity multiplier) than an equivalently sized and
skilled group of closed-source programmers (de)motivated by scarcity
rewards.

This suggests from a slightly different angle one of the
speculations in The Cathedral And The Bazaar;
that, ultimately, the industrial/factory mode of software production
was doomed to be outcompeted from the moment capitalism began to
create enough of a wealth surplus that many programmers could live in
a post-scarcity gift culture.

Indeed, it seems the prescription for highest software
productivity is almost a Zen paradox; if you want the most efficient
production, you must give up trying to make
programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads,
and forget about deadlines. To a conventional manager this sounds
crazily indulgent and doomed—but it is exactly
the recipe with which the open-source culture is now clobbering its
competition.